perl584delta - what is new for perl v5.8.4
This document describes differences between the 5.8.3
release and the 5.8.4 release.
Many minor bugs have been fixed. Scripts which happen to
rely on previously erroneous behaviour will consider these
fixes as incompatible changes :-) You are advised to perform
sufficient acceptance testing on this release to satisfy
yourself that this does not affect you, before
putting this release into production.
The diagnostic output of Carp has been changed slightly,
to add a space after the comma between arguments. This
makes it much easier for tools such as web browsers to
wrap it, but might confuse any automatic tools which perform
detailed parsing of Carp output.
The internal dump output has been improved, so that nonprintable
characters such as newline and backspace are
output in "otation, rather than octal. This might
just confuse non-robust tools which parse the output of
modules such as Devel::Peek.
Malloc wrapping
Perl can now be built to detect attempts to assign pathologically
large chunks of memory. Previously such assignments
would suffer from integer wrap-around during size
calculations causing a misallocation, which would crash
perl, and could theoretically be used for "stack smashing"
attacks. The wrapping defaults to enabled on platforms
where we know it works (most AIX configurations, BSDi,
Darwin, DEC OSF/1, FreeBSD, HP/UX, GNU Linux, OpenBSD,
Solaris, VMS and most Win32 compilers) and defaults to
disabled on other platforms.
Unicode Character Database 4.0.1 [Toc] [Back]
The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in
Perl 5.8 has been updated to 4.0.1 from 4.0.0.
suidperl less insecure
Paul Szabo has analysed and patched "suidperl" to remove
existing known insecurities. Currently there are no known
holes in "suidperl", but previous experience shows that we
cannot be confident that these were the last. You may no
longer invoke the set uid perl directly, so to preserve
backwards compatibility with scripts that invoke
#!/usr/bin/suidperl the only set uid binary is now
"sperl5.8."n ("sperl5.8.4" for this release). "suidperl"
is installed as a hard link to "perl"; both "suidperl" and
"perl" will invoke "sperl5.8.4" automatically the set uid
binary, so this change should be completely transparent.
For new projects the core perl team would strongly recommend
that you use dedicated, single purpose security tools
such as "sudo" in preference to "suidperl".
format
In addition to bug fixes, "format"'s features have been
enhanced. See perlform
The (mis)use of "/tmp" in core modules and documentation
has been tidied up. Some modules available both within
the perl core and independently from CPAN ("dual-life modules")
have not yet had these changes applied; the changes
will be integrated into future stable perl releases as the
modules are updated on CPAN.
Updated modules [Toc] [Back]
Attribute::Handlers
B
Benchmark
CGI
Carp
Cwd
Exporter
File::Find
IO
IPC::Open3
Local::Maketext
Math::BigFloat
Math::BigInt
Math::BigRat
MIME::Base64
ODBM_File
POSIX
Shell
Socket
There is experimental support for Linux abstract Unix
domain sockets.
Storable
Switch
Synced with its CPAN version 2.10
Sys::Syslog
"syslog()" can now use numeric constants for facility
names and priorities, in addition to strings.
Term::ANSIColor
Time::HiRes
Unicode::UCD
Win32
Win32.pm/Win32.xs has moved from the libwin32 module
to core Perl
base
open
threads
Detached threads are now also supported on Windows.
utf8
Performance Enhancements [Toc] [Back] o Accelerated Unicode case mappings ("/i", "lc", "uc",
etc).
o In place sort optimised (eg "@a = sort @a")
o Unnecessary assignment optimised away in
my $s = undef;
my @a = ();
my %h = ();
o Optimised "map" in scalar context
The Perl debugger (lib/perl5db.pl) can now save all debugger
commands for sourcing later, and can display the parent
inheritance tree of a given class.
Installation and Configuration Improvements [Toc] [Back] The build process on both VMS and Windows has had several
minor improvements made. On Windows Borland's C compiler
can now compile perl with PerlIO and/or USE_LARGE_FILES
enabled.
"perl.exe" on Windows now has a "Camel" logo icon. The use
of a camel with the topic of Perl is a trademark of
O'Reilly and Associates Inc., and is used with their permission
(ie distribution of the source, compiling a Windows
executable from it, and using that executable
locally). Use of the supplied camel for anything other
than a perl executable's icon is specifically not covered,
and anyone wishing to redistribute perl binaries with the
icon should check directly with O'Reilly beforehand.
Perl should build cleanly on Stratus VOS once more. More utf8 bugs fixed, notably in how "chomp", "chop",
"send", and "syswrite" and interact with utf8 data. Concatenation
now works correctly when "use bytes;" is in
scope.
Pragmata are now correctly propagated into (?{...}) constructions
in regexps. Code such as
my $x = qr{ ... (??{ $x }) ... };
will now (correctly) fail under use strict. (As the inner
$x is and has always referred to $::x)
The "const in void context" warning has been suppressed
for a constant in an optimised-away boolean expression
such as "5 || print;"
"perl -i" could "fchmod(stdin)" by mistake. This is serious
if stdin is attached to a terminal, and perl is running
as root. Now fixed.
New or Changed Diagnostics [Toc] [Back] "Carp" and the internal diagnostic routines used by
"Devel::Peek" have been made clearer, as described in
"Incompatible Changes"
Some bugs have been fixed in the hash internals.
Restricted hashes and their place holders are now allocated
and deleted at slightly different times, but this
should not be visible to user code.
Code freeze for the next maintenance release (5.8.5) will
be on 30th June 2004, with release by mid July.
Platform Specific Problems [Toc] [Back] This release is known not to build on Windows 95.
If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the
articles recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup
and the perl bug database at http://bugs.perl.org.
There may also be information at http://www.perl.org, the
Perl Home Page.
If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the
perlbug program included with your release. Be sure to
trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case.
Your bug report, along with the output of "perl -V", will
be sent off to [email protected] to be analysed by the Perl
porting team. You can browse and search the Perl 5 bugs
at http://bugs.perl.org/
The Changes file for exhaustive details on what changed.
The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.
The README file for general stuff.
The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.
perl v5.8.5 2002-11-06 5 [ Back ] | 